GMLC 1.3.11 – Grid Analysis and Design for Energy and Infrastructure Resiliency for New Orleans

Lead Performer: Sandia National Laboratories – Albuquerque, NM

Partners:

-- Los Alamos National Laboratory – Los Alamos, NM
-- City of New Orleans – New Orleans, LA
-- Entergy New Orleans – New Orleans, LA
-- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – New Orleans, LA
-- 100 Resilient Cities – New York, NY

DOE Total Funding: $1,000,000 (GMI funding is a joint EERE/OE initiative; BTO funds contribute to total)

Project Term: October 2015 – February 2017

Funding Opportunity: DOE Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (GMLC) Lab Call

Project Objective

As a part of the Department of Energy’s Grid Modernization Initiative, the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium projects represent a comprehensive portfolio of critical research and development in advanced storage systems, clean energy integration, standards and test procedures, and a number of other key grid modernization areas.

This project was developed to help identify a set of cost-effective options for enhancing the resilience of grid operations and the community of New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA). The project comprised several major tasks:

• Infrastructure Impact Modeling and Analysis: The team identified a set of extreme weather-related threat scenarios (e.g., hurricanes, flooding) and leveraged infrastructure models to identify magnitude, duration, and location of power outages and the associated consequences to critical infrastructure and community operations.
• Resilient Power Distribution Modeling and Analysis: The team used the infrastructure impact analysis to identify grid performance and resilience goals (e.g., load requirements by location, time duration estimates for operation).
• Integration of Distributed, Renewable, Energy Storage, and Energy Efficiency Options: The team explored various options to increase energy resiliency by the addition of renewables, local distributed generation, energy storage, and increased energy efficiency integration.
• Cost/Benefit Analysis: The team will evaluate the costs and benefits of the grid resilience enhancement options and opportunities for use of transactional control benefits between the microgrids and distributed generation and the grid to reduce energy costs.

Project Impact

The immediate outcome of this project was that NOLA, Entergy, and relevant stakeholders were provided with a set of risk-informed, cost-effectiveness recommendations for grid resilience enhancement, including advanced Smart Grid technologies and microgrids that utilize modern communication and energy management and control technologies to improve demand/response opportunities. These recommendations were delivered in the form of conceptual designs that could be utilized by NOLA, Entergy, and state and federal agencies to rank energy infrastructure improvement options and set improvement implementation and funding priorities, considering not only improvements in grid operations and the impact to the dependent infrastructure during disaster scenarios, but also during nominal operations.

Contacts

DOE Technology Manager: Joe Hagerman

Principle Investigator:  Robert Jeffers, SNL; Mary Ewers, LANL